Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (14 page)

Everyone's heard the story about Benjamin Franklin flying a kite during a thunderstorm and proving that lightning and electricity were the same. But his discoveries and inventions extended beyond just science to politics, civic improvements, meteorology, and everyday life
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Given how many things Benjamin Franklin invented, it's a wonder he had time to help found a nation. Here's a sampling: He invented bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove—a safe, metal-lined furnace that created fewer sparks than old fireplaces, circulated heat, and used less wood. Those are among the most famous, but he also developed a flexible catheter for his brother who suffered from kidney stones, a chair with a reversible seat that could function as a stepladder, an odometer to measure postal routes, a “long arm” mechanical device to pluck books from high shelves, and swim fins. Franklin didn't patent any of them, though. Instead, he put them all in the public domain so that everyone could use them.

 

 

In 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk introduced his polio vaccine to the world, putting the city of Pittsburgh at the forefront of the development and testing of what many people considered a “miracle” medicine
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P
olio has been around for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian art shows children with withered limbs using canes, and many historians believe that Roman emperor Claudius walked with a limp as a result of having polio as a child. The first cases of the virus weren't reported in the United States until 1894, though, when 132 children in Vermont came down with the disease.

Over the next five decades, polio became one of the most feared and mysterious diseases in America. It wasn't the most deadly; many more people died of influenza and pneumonia. But polio seemed to appear without warning and affected mostly children. There was also no cure, and no precautionary measures seemed to ward the disease off completely. By 1952—the height of the polio epidemic in America—58,000 cases were reported, and parents, scientists, and government officials clamored for anything that would relieve the suffering. That's where Jonas Salk and Pittsburgh came in.

Jonas Salk was born in New York City in 1914. The child of Russian immigrants, Salk was the first in his family to go to college. He attended the City College of New York and then medical school at New York University, where he got involved with a research group investigating the influenza virus.

Two decades earlier, in 1918, a strain of influenza had killed a staggering 25 million people worldwide, including thousands of American soldiers fighting in World War I. When World War II began in 1939, the U.S. government stepped up efforts to create a flu vaccine to protect its soldiers abroad. Scientists had recently isolated the germ that caused influenza, and Salk worked with microbiologist Thomas Francis Jr. (first at NYU and then at the University of Michigan) to develop a flu vaccine for American soldiers. Their vaccine used killed strains of the flu virus and laid the foundation for much of Salk's later polio research.

In 1947, the University of Pittsburgh offered Salk a job: head of the medical school's Virus Research Lab. The goal for Salk and his team (which included Francis and other researchers from around the country) was to develop a safe and effective polio vaccine.

Over the next five years, Salk made some incredible discoveries. First, he managed to isolate the specific germs that caused polio and found that there were actually three strains of the virus. Then he figured out how to create killed forms of each strain and include them in a single vaccine that prevented polio infection. By proving that killed strains of the virus could create the antibodies necessary for immunization, Salk also proved one of his own longstanding theories: that killed virus vaccines could be just as effective as muted live virus vaccines, which contained weakened (but live) germs and ran a risk of infection. This went against the popular opinion of the time, which dictated that only a muted form of a live virus would work.

Salk's team wasn't the only research group looking for a polio vaccine, and they got some outside help from other
scientists who made important discoveries of their own. In particular, researchers in Boston discovered how to grow the poliovirus in human tissue. This meant Salk's laboratory tests could be more accurate. (He'd been using monkeys.)

By 1952, Salk was satisfied that his vaccine was finished, but so far, it had worked only in the laboratory. It was now time to test it out on humans. His first subjects: his wife and three sons. None showed any ill effects, and none contracted polio.

Next, he expanded the clinical trials to a large group of schoolchildren. Since his goal was to see protective polio antibody levels rise in their blood, Salk also needed a control sample. He found it in a group of children at the D. T. Watson Home, about 12 miles outside of Pittsburgh, who had recovered from polio.

The first children outside of Salk's family to receive the polio vaccine (which Salk called the “Pittsburgh Vaccine”) were from the city's Arsenal Elementary School on 40th Street. When the notices went home about the coming vaccine trials, eager parents returned the permission slips in droves.

Over the next year, more than 15,000 children around Pittsburgh took part in the clinical trials. And in 1953, Salk and his colleagues expanded their experiment to 1.8 million children throughout the United States, Canada, and Finland. By 1955, the scientists were satisfied with the vaccine's results: it was 70 percent effective against the first strain of polio and 90 percent effective against the second and third strains.

Immediately, mass immunization campaigns sprang up across the United States. And by 1957, the number of reported polio
cases had dropped by about 85 percent. By 1994, polio had been nearly eradicated in the United States.

Jonas Salk never patented his vaccine; he wanted the entire world to benefit from his discovery. But Salk wasn't without his critics. He often gets credit for developing the “first” polio vaccine, but in reality, his was just the first to find mainstream success in the United States. In 1950, Hilary Koprowski, a doctor and researcher from Poland who eventually settled in Philadelphia, introduced a live oral vaccine that proved successful in trials. Koprowski had neither the funding nor the backing of a major institution to bring his vaccine to the American public, but he used it in other countries, including Zaire, where a quarter of a million children received the inoculation.

Koprowski's efforts also inspired Albert Sabin, a researcher at the University of Cincinnati, to develop his own live oral polio vaccine in 1957. Salk's vaccine worked to prevent the debilitating effects of polio, but it didn't always protect against the initial flu-like symptoms. Also, it required booster shots. Sabin's vaccine, on the other hand, prevented the disease altogether and required only one dose. For almost 30 years, Sabin's oral vaccine was the most widely used means of preventing polio. But in 1999, the U.S. Public Health Service recommended that doctors return to using Salk's killed-virus vaccine in order to prevent the handful of polio infections caused by the live-virus version.

In 2005, the University of Pittsburgh hosted a symposium
honoring the 50th anniversary of the vaccine's development. The speakers included the university's researchers, polio experts, and even Jonas Salk's son, Peter, who also became a doctor and researcher. He has spent most of his professional career researching vaccines for the HIV and AIDS viruses.